“I won’t let anything bad happen to you.” I was getting very good at making promises I couldn’t keep. “I won’t let you get stuck here in a cage. Come on.”

I pulled him to his feet.

Curran looked at Nasrin. “Carry him if you have to. We need to go.”

Nasrin took Christopher’s hand. “Here, hold on to me. It’s okay. It will be fine.”

We began jogging past the cells. Corpses watched us pass with empty orbs. The putrid smell choked me. Dear God. So many people.

“Child!” a female voice called.

I stopped in midstep. I knew that voice.

An arm in a dark sleeve thrust between the bars, above a rotting corpse pressed against the iron. A woman looked at me from inside the nearest cell. The last time I saw her she had been middle-aged, with a stocky powerful build and a face the color of walnut. She looked decades older now. Her cheeks sank into her skull, hollow and withdrawn. Her skin hung off her bones. Dirt and dry blood stained the indigo mesh veil covering her dark hair and forehead. She was a ghost of her former self.

“Naeemah.”

“Child.”

She came from an ancient family of shapeshifters who served as bodyguards. Months ago Hugh had hired her to guard me, though not out of the goodness of his heart. He had begun to suspect that there was something off about me, but Roland sent him on another assignment, so he instructed her to watch over me and keep me alive until he could come back and pick up where he’d left off. My aunt had chosen that particular time to waltz into town. Without Naeemah’s help, I would’ve been dead.

I turned to Curran. “We have to get her out.”

He grabbed the bars and let go. “Silver. I need the saws.”

“We’re short on time,” Jim said.

“I’m not moving until she’s out,” I said.

Jim gave me a hard look.

“She said she wants her out,” Andrea told him. “Don’t give her any crap.”

“Take your time,” Ghastek said. His vampires moved to cover the way we had come. “Nobody should starve to death in a cell.”

Jim pulled out the saws and he and Curran began slicing through the bars. Metal screeched.

Naeemah watched me with feverish eyes.

“What are you doing here? Did Hugh put you here?”

“Yes. For helping you,” she said. “And for my son.”

“What happened to your son?”

“He refused a job for d’Ambray. I’m a lesson he wants to teach my children.”

I added one more item to my “Reasons to Kill Hugh” list. It was getting long.

One cell bar hit the floor.

A vampire shot into the passageway. Ghastek’s ancients moved like the two blades of a pair of scissors. Two coordinated slices of their talons and the invader’s head rolled to the floor.